Jake Needham - Killing Plato

“I don’t see anything odd about the NSC being interested in Indonesia. That’s what they do. They track hot spots and advise the president on how to respond before a full-blown crisis develops.”

Karsarkis leaned back and crossed his legs at the knee. He seemed to think for a moment about what I is said, but I doubted that. My guess was that he was thinking about something else altogether, something I probably could never even begin to imagine.

“Cynthia’s job was to build a close relationship with a group of presumably moderate Indonesian Muslims,” he said. “The idea was to cultivate a manageable force as buffer between the military and the worst of the Islamic radicals.”

“That sounds familiar.”

“Yes, it does, doesn’t it? It’s the formula you Americans always use, and it just keeps blowing up in your faces. Good God, you can see the same thing happening over and over. Americans try to make friends with some revolutionary movement that seems less dangerous than the rest of them, starts supplying resources, even weapons, then eventually these people turn the very weapons you gave them against you and the cycle starts all over again with someone new.”

Karsarkis uncrossed his legs and leaned toward me.

“Cynthia was in contact with an Indonesian known to her as Jabir. He convinced her if his group was to maintain its credibility with Indonesian Muslims, it had to show the ability and the will to engage in violence. Eventually Cynthia bought the argument-actually, it did make sense-and agreed to provide weapons as well as some explosives and detonators to Jabir. I agreed to allow her to use ships owned by Icon to do it. For his part, Jabir promised he would only engage in small operations that caused limited damage, undertaking them just for the effect of it but…” Karsarkis rolled his shoulders in a sort of shrug, “things didn’t work out quite that way.”

“What happened?”

“Some of the explosives we delivered to him were used for the Christmas Eve bombing campaign in 2000. Thirty Christian churches in Indonesia were bombed almost simultaneously, but most of the devices were so badly made they only managed to kill about a dozen people. Some more of the stuff turned up in Singapore five years later when the Singaporeans broke up a plot to bomb the American and Australian embassies there.”

“And the rest of it?” I asked. “What happened to the rest of it?”

I thought I could guess where this was going, but I hoped I was wrong.

“Yes, well…” Karsarkis looked away.

“Bali?” I asked.

Karsarkis nodded slowly. “When the bombings took place in Bali, some of the explosives and one of the detonators were traced back to the original lot Cynthia acquired for Jabir, the stuff Icon delivered to him.”

“Oh, Christ,” I said, shaking my head slowly. “And Jabir? What happened to him?”

“I don’t know. He just faded away. Maybe we were manipulated from the beginning. Maybe he never even existed.” Karsarkis spoke so softly I had to strain to hear him. “Nearly two hundred people dead, most of them Australian kids, and the stuff that killed them traceable to an NSC operation gone wrong and a man who may never have existed.”

“And you, of course. Those explosives were also traceable to you.”

“Yes,” Karsarkis nodded. “With your usual quickness, Jack, you seem to have grasped the first part of my problem.”

“Was that when they indicted you for the oil s Jaales?”

“It was a neat move, I have to admit. Painting me as a traitor for selling embargoed Iraqi oil pretty well gutted any claim I might make that I’d been nothing but a delivery boy for the NSC in Indonesia. Cynthia was the only person who knew the truth of it, at least the only person I had any contact with who knew, and she had always been straight with me. Without her, the NSC could pin the weapons and explosives shipped to Indonesia solely on me whenever they wanted to.”

“And Cynthia was dead.”

“I see you have now grasped the second part of my problem. Cynthia would have told the truth,” he said. “Cynthia would have saved me.”

At first, what Karsarkis was saying came to me only fleetingly, like a sudden draft through an empty room. Then suddenly I understood it all. The truth broke over me like a cold ocean wave.

“You’re saying someone working for the NSC killed Cynthia Kim?”

“Yes.”

“They killed her because she knew the NSC was behind the shipments, not you?”

“Yes.”

“They killed her because she was going to testify to that?”

“Yes.”

“And then they killed Mike and Mia, and they tried to kill me to warn you to keep your mouth shut?”

“The others, yes. But I’m not sure about you. Maybe it was just a coincidence you were in the car with Mia that day.”

Karsarkis looked like he was about to say something else, but instead he walked back over to the green vinyl chair where he had been sitting when I first saw him. His back was to me and I couldn’t see what he was doing, but when he turned around again he was holding a white, letter-sized envelope. He gave me a half-smile, rueful and cheerless, and tossed it onto my bed.

“Fortunately for me, however, all is not entirely lost.”

I eyed the envelope. It wasn’t flat like it would have been if it had folded paper in it. It was slightly lumpy.

“After the Bali bombing there was a panicked debriefing of Cynthia by some NSA and White House people,” he said. “They conducted the debriefing in Singapore. Because they didn’t want Cynthia anywhere near the embassy, they used the Four Seasons Hotel for it, but they were in such a hurry they ignored even the most basic security precautions.”

Karsarkis looked at me as if he wondered whether I caught the importance of that. I said nothing.

“Cynthia was scared,” he went on. “She wasn’t sure whether they would try to hang Bali on me or on her, but she knew damned well they weren’t going to let it be tied back to the White House. She asked me to arrange to bug the suite at the Four Seasons where the debriefing took place. Mike took care of it. Cynthia’s questioners never suspected a thing.”

I glanced at the envelope again. I had no doubt now what was in it.

“I have the original tapes myself, and those…” Karsarkis inclined his head toward the white envelope, “are the only copies.”

“What’s on them?”

“Two NSC people and a very senior White House official talking to Cynthia damage limitation with respect to the Bali bombing. They wanted to make sure there was no way to connect it seto their screwed-up operation.”

Karsarkis watched me with a slight smile when he said that and I felt the pieces of his story beginning to come together in my mind.

“A senior White House official?”

“Uh-huh,” Karsarkis said, his expression neutral.

“That wouldn’t happen to be anyone I know, would it?”

“It’s a funny old world sometimes, Jack.”

Things that never made any sense before were beginning to click together like pieces of an animated jigsaw puzzle that had all of a sudden lurched into motion and started to assemble itself.

“Does the NSC know about the tapes?”

“When the rumors started about Cynthia testifying for me, they guessed we had something, but they couldn’t be sure what it was.”

“This was behind the pardon all the time, wasn’t it?” I watched Karsarkis carefully. “If I had gone to the White House with a pardon application, they would have known you really did have something.”

“Yes, I think they would have looked at it that way.”

“Even you wouldn’t have had the balls to ask for a pardon if you didn’t have something pretty good to trade for it.”